Chapter 27 Sinking Fear
SINKING FEAR
Iturned to Bo slowly, the weight of what had just been said settling somewhere deep inside my chest. Because there was only one way those words made sense, and I hated that my mind had already reached it before I could stop it.
“You did this… how… how could you…” The accusation came out quieter than I intended, strained and unsteady, as though even speaking it made something inside me fracture further.
Bo’s reaction was immediate, his head snapping toward me as panic replaced whatever composure he had left. His hands lifted slightly, as if he didn’t know whether to reach for me or defend himself.
“No, no, that’s not what this is…” he rushed out, stumbling over the words in a way I had never heard from him before, his usual confidence stripped back to something raw and uncertain.
“You’ve got it wrong, I swear to you, I didn’t…”
“Silence!” The word didn’t just interrupt him, it took him, cutting through the air with a force that didn’t belong to sound alone.
And I watched in real time as Bo’s body locked where he stood.
His jaw was clenched as if he were trying to fight it, but unable to move, unable to even finish what he had been saying.
Each passing second felt like I was breathing through something dense and suffocating, my chest tightening as unease crawled its way up my spine. And then I saw them.
At first, they were only shapes, barely visible through the shifting haze of ash and distance. But as they moved closer, the details began to take form, and what I saw made something inside me recoil.
They looked like Bo.
Or at least… they had once.
Now they were hollowed versions of him, their bodies gaunt and stretched thin. Their movements were disjointed and unnatural as they staggered forward in uneven steps. Their eyes were empty, completely devoid of thought, of will, of anything that suggested they were still… themselves.
A sick, crawling realization settled in my stomach as I watched them.
“What are they…?” I breathed, the words barely leaving me.
The man smiled then, not in amusement, not even in cruelty, but in something far worse, with something that suggested this was nothing more than routine to him.
“Fuel.”
That word… Goddess, it was so cold… so unfeeling.
As if any life that wasn’t his own meant nothing.
Something he proved when he lifted his hand, and one of the creatures froze mid-step.
Its body jerked violently before being dragged forward by an invisible force.
Its limbs were stiff and unresponsive as it was pulled toward him.
It didn’t even scream.
As for the evil bastard who was now pulling its strings, he didn’t even look at him as he lifted one hand. His fingers curled slightly as though he were testing the weight of something unseen, and the ground beneath us responded instantly.
I felt it before I saw it, the subtle tremor beneath my feet. The way the ash shifted, cracked, and then split entirely as the first jagged column of stone tore upward between us. I staggered back at the same time Bo did the same, bringing us closer together, trapped in the middle of chaos.
But it didn’t stop there.
More followed, erupting from the earth in violent succession, twisting and rising into towering, uneven spires that enclosed us on every side. Each formed something that could only be described as a cage, though nothing about it felt clean or structured.
These weren’t walls.
They were Hell’s teeth.
Blackened stone fused with veins of that same sick violet glow I had seen beneath Iridessa’s skin, pulsing faintly. As though whatever had taken hold of her had followed us here, threading itself through the very ground we now stood on.
As for the zombie goblin, he was using and stripping him of what looked like his very life source, and he didn’t fight.
That was what made it worse.
Because whatever it was that remained inside it had already given up.
Its body collapsed inward as it reached its limit. The life draining from it in seconds, its flesh shriveling, sinking against bone until it became nothing more than a hollow shell that crumbled into ash at his feet.
Bo made a pained sound beside me, like he had felt it himself, and when I glanced at him, I saw it, the way his expression tightened. The way something like horror flickered behind his eyes before he forced it down.
The bastard exhaled slowly, as though he had just taken in something deeply satisfying, and the cage around us solidified further. The jagged stone locked into place with a final, suffocating certainty.
“Do not worry,” he said lightly, his attention shifting at last. His gaze settled on me through the small gaps in the rock and in a way that made my skin prickle,
“I have already ensured your Enforcer will follow.”
My pulse stuttered as I uttered a desperate,
“No.”
“Oh, he will come for you, I have no doubt about that,” he continued, that same calm certainty threading through his voice.
“Exactly where I want him.”
And then, just as easily as he had appeared, he turned and walked away. The creatures followed after him in slow, obedient movements, leaving us alone in a silence that felt heavier than anything that had come before it.
I turned to Bo immediately, the question already burning its way out of me.
“Who the hell was that?” I asked, and this time the word hell felt far more literal than I would have liked.
He dragged a hand over his mainly bald head, pacing like he needed the movement just to stay grounded. Before finally coming to a stop in front of me. Then he looked out toward where the bastard had disappeared, his jaw tightening as he answered.
“That… is Lord Dantalion,” he said, the name carrying weight even in the way he spoke it, stripped of his usual sarcasm.
“He used to be a high-ranking Duke of Hell. Someone who once commanded thirty-six legions, but due to his atrocities and mass murder of his own people, he was stripped of his power and sent here as punishment.”
“Goddess,” I hissed.
“Yeah, you can say that again, girly, as he didn’t exactly need armies to fight his wars, not when he just sucked the life out of them and became the most powerful thing on the battlefield.”
“Fuck.” This time, the curse was uttered through my teeth. I felt my stomach twist at that, my gaze flicking briefly to the ash at our feet.
“Needless to say, he is known for his ability to control life, thoughts, and the will of others… a power he was never fully stripped of, despite their efforts.
“Their efforts?”
“Oblivion helped put him here,” Bo replied, making me suck back a quick breath.
“So now he wants revenge,” I remarked, although it wasn’t exactly much of a guess, as it was pretty damn obvious at this point.
“That and more, no doubt,” he replied before going on to tell me,
“It wasn’t just Oblivion; his father stood with him. Because once Dantalion had grown too strong, once he had gathered enough power to rival a God, that was when they knew they had no choice but to bring him down.”
“But why didn’t they just kill him?” I asked, as well, it would have seemed like the safest choice to me.
“They didn’t kill him because death would have been mercy, and this…” he gestured around us, his lip curling faintly,
“…this is about as far from mercy as you can get and is what he deserved. An immortal king of nothing to live out an eternity powerless and desolate… well, that had been the plan, anyway,” he added, muttering this last part wryly.
The words settled heavily, but they didn’t answer the question clawing its way through me.
“And me, was that always the plan, Bo? How could you?” he winced at that before arguing,
“I didn’t know!” The force of his argument rang with something that felt painfully close to the truth.
“You think I would have done this if I had known?”
“Then explain it!” I snapped and watched as his chest rose and fell heavily, as he forced himself to steady.
“I was tethered, okay,” he said finally, his voice rough now.
“Tethered to you. Or to whoever Oblivion’s Siren was meant to be, but I didn’t know…
fuck girly, how could I have known… and then that bastard got lucky, seeing as Oblivion’s Siren had some magic in her.
I thought it was chance when you summoned me, I thought I got lucky, thought I had finally escaped…
but it wasn’t that at all. I was led straight to you, pulled out of this fucked up land of Null, finally able to think on my own,” he said, the words coming thick and fast, like he just needed to blurt it all out, and by the end, I couldn’t help but feel for him.
As if something inside me sank at his admission.
“You were used,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he muttered, bitterness cutting through the word.
“Looks like we both were.”
My gaze flicked back toward the wasteland, toward where those hollow creatures had disappeared.
“And them?” I asked.
“They’re my kind,” he said quietly.
“Or at least what’s left of them. He takes control, traps you inside your own head, while your body does whatever he wants.
You feel it all, but you can’t stop it as it feeds him, and let’s just say that there used to be a lot more of us.
” A shiver ran through me at this, hating that he had lost so many of his people to such evil.
“That’s why you wanted to stay so badly?” I realized softly, and he gave a humorless laugh.
“Do you blame me?”
No, I didn’t.
“I swear I didn’t know Girly; I swear on the souls of my kin that I honestly thought the mirror would show you the truth, and I didn’t know that you had to be the one touching it…
But there is no denying it now… You are his Siren.
” I couldn’t help but close my eyes as I heard this, every fiber of my being shuddering as a deep sense of completeness washed over me.
Every single time Oblivion had made the claim with such certainty came back to me now. Because he had known and had never once faltered in that knowledge.
I should have trusted him.